The Jonathan Kuminga market finally moved on Monday, and it moved in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ direction.
According to The Athletic’s Dan Woike, the Los Angeles Lakers’ pursuit of the free agent forward has gone cold. Los Angeles has little appetite for surrendering meaningful draft capital in a sign-and-trade, and the money gap between the team and the 23-year-old remains wide enough that the Lakers are content to look elsewhere for now.
Buried in that same report was the line that matters most in Northeast Ohio. Woike described the Cavs as “the team most often connected to Kuminga other than the Lakers.”
That framing carries weight because Los Angeles had been treated as the frontrunner from the moment the Atlanta Hawks made Kuminga an unrestricted free agent by declining his $24.3 million team option at the start of July. General manager Rob Pelinka and head coach JJ Redick met with Kuminga virtually and sold him on a featured wing role next to Luka Doncic.
Cleveland, meanwhile, has spent most of the month positioned as the patient party in this market, unable to outbid anyone but unwilling to leave the conversation.
Patience, it turns out, may have been the right posture. The presumed leader just blinked.
The Dort trade boxed in Los Angeles
The Lakers’ problem is not only about money. It is about geometry, and Sunday made the geometry worse. The Oklahoma City Thunder sent Lu Dort to Atlanta in a three-team, cost-cutting trade, giving the Hawks an established defensive wing on a $17.7 million expiring salary.
That acquisition reshaped Atlanta’s posture in the Kuminga talks. With Dort in the fold, the Hawks are now disinclined to take salary back in any Kuminga scenario, which means routing him to Los Angeles would require a third team to absorb money — and the Lakers, after extending Austin Reaves and emptying their draft cupboard in the Walker Kessler deal, cannot afford to compensate both Atlanta and a facilitator.
The Lakers simply do not have the assets to pay two trade partners at once. None of that erases Los Angeles from the picture entirely. Kuminga remains the biggest upside swing left on the board and that the Lakers could circle back if his market stays quiet.
But a suitor that needs a three-team structure it cannot fund is a suitor negotiating from weakness, and Kuminga’s camp surely knows it.
Cleveland’s route runs through Max Strus
Sean Deveney sketched what a Cleveland version of this deal actually looks like, and it is less about Kuminga than about the roster around him. The Cavs remain squarely in the sign-and-trade mix, he reported, with one catch: the workable constructions require a third team ready to take on Max Strus and the $16.7 million he is owed in the final year of his contract.
The mechanics are unforgiving. Acquiring a player by sign-and-trade hard-caps the receiving team at the first apron, and Cleveland’s books are already groaning.
Donovan Mitchell’s record extension is locked in, James Harden’s next contract has been parked while the front office waits out free agency’s biggest domino and the Cavs are straining to squeeze the full roster under the second apron regardless of how the summer resolves.
Per Deveney, Strus is the salary most likely to move no matter what happens — whether to clear a runway for LeBron James or simply to get under the line — and Dennis Schroder, who has already suited up for 11 NBA franchises, is another contract Cleveland would willingly send to a 12th.
There is also a third path that involves neither Ohio nor California. Deveney noted that a club outside the two-team framing — he pointed to New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago — could hand Kuminga a modest one-year deal and treat him as a February trade chip. For a 23-year-old who has been holding out for real money, that outcome would represent the market calling his bluff.
The LeBron domino drops first
None of this proceeds until James chooses, and the wait may finally be measured in hours rather than weeks. James is expected to make his call early this week, now that Fanatics Fest and the World Cup have cleared the calendar of excuses.
Marc Stein, opening his SiriusXM show Monday, framed the holding pattern bluntly, noting that the watch “threatens to stray into Week 4.”
The sequencing cuts both ways for Cleveland. If James picks the Cavs, the Strus and Schroder salaries almost certainly move to make his contract work rather than Kuminga’s, and a hard-capped sign-and-trade becomes close to impossible to stack on top of it — the same outgoing money cannot be spent twice.
Deveney went further, reporting that a James homecoming would push Jarrett Allen and even Evan Mobley back into trade conversations as the roster’s cost balloons.
If James goes elsewhere, the calculus flips. Kuminga becomes the natural consolation pivot, the wing rotation still needs the athleticism it lost this summer, and — crucially, after Monday — Cleveland would no longer be bidding against the league’s most glamorous franchise. A market with no Lakers pressure is a market that comes to the Cavs’ price.
What the Cavs would be getting
The player himself remains the same tantalizing, unfinished bet he was three weeks ago. Kuminga, who turns 24 in October, averaged 12.2 points, 5.6 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game across 36 appearances last season split between Golden State and Atlanta, shooting 46.3 percent from the field.
The 6-foot-7 forward was the No. 7 overall pick in 2021 and won a title as a rookie, and the fit case in Cleveland has been consistent since he first surfaced in the Cavs’ orbit: Kenny Atkinson built a relationship with him as a Golden State assistant, and the wing rotation thinned noticeably over the first weeks of free agency.
Monday’s news does not deliver Kuminga to Cleveland, and it does not settle his price. What it does is drain the urgency from a market the Cavs were never going to win with money.
The Lakers stepping back removes the one bidder capable of forcing Cleveland’s hand, and it leaves Kuminga’s camp staring at a shrinking list of teams that can pay him what he wants.
The Cavs have spent three weeks being told to wait — on James, on Harden, on the aprons. As of Monday, waiting finally looks like leverage.
